Eleven million people are at this moment without reliable power. Elderly Cubans in Havana are selling cigarettes on the sidewalk to purchase food. A mother in Havana cannot provide lunch for her daughters. The country’s ration system is delivering rice and split chickpeas. Hospitals are without supplies. The United Nations is preparing emergency aid. And Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s June 22 Wall Street Journal column assembles every piece of that documented suffering — the blackouts, the hunger, the collapsing infrastructure — and deploys it as evidence that American sanctions had nothing to do with any of it.
We built this apparatus at the Journal for years: take a real crisis, concede its visible facts, and use the concession to make invisible the variable whose inclusion would implicate the policy you are defending. O’Grady is one of the page’s longest-tenured operators. This column walks through the technique deployments as they appear.
The opening frames the column’s central thesis: Cuba’s widespread misery is the regime’s fault, and when the dictatorship blames Washington, it is making excuses. Two frame-engineered relabelings in a single gesture. Not “the embargo.” Not “the most comprehensive trade restrictions imposed on a Western Hemisphere nation in modern history.” Not “the sanctions regime under which foreign companies are punished for doing business with a neighbor ninety miles from Key West.” The specifics of sixty-four years of economic strangulation dissolve into the institutional grammar of a Georgetown dinner reception. That is message discipline — I recognize it because I spent two decades writing it. The drill was: replace the specific policy with the vague noun phrase so the reader’s mind can move on. The word is sanctions. The modifier is Cuba’s. The sentence builds a road and then rips out its destination.
And the move does double duty. It collapses the entire debate into a cartoon: the regime says “blame Washington,” and anyone who questions the embargo is merely repeating the dictatorship’s talking points. This lets the piece dismiss, without engaging, the U.N. General Assembly’s annual near-unanimous condemnation — 187–2 last year, with only Israel joining the United States — and the preponderance of humanitarian and journalistic accounts showing the blockade is the binding constraint accelerating the collapse. Open with the regime’s position, slot every critic into that position, and let the reader forget that the embargo is a weapon aimed at the regime and landing on the population.
The column describes the routine blackouts and the gallows humor they spawned. O’Grady reaches for Carmelo Mesa-Lago’s 2005 paper for the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy — a legitimate source, and I have more than a memo’s worth of respect for the painstaking record he has built of Cuban institutional failure. The column deploys a dark-humor coinage from the streets of Havana — Cubans reportedly joke that the rare moments when electricity is available have become the exception rather than the rule, flipping the language of outages on its head. The grid in 2005 was barely functional: thermoelectric plants twenty-five to thirty-five years old, parts sourcing nearly impossible, 1.9 million breakers in want of replacement, distribution lines leaking nearly a fifth of generated power. Real data, honestly cited.
What the column does not observe — because naming it is the piece’s load-bearing structural prohibition — is what the document also chronicles. Those plants could not be replaced, because the sanctions regime made it functionally impossible. The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, tightened further since, allowed the United States to sanction any foreign company that participated in transactions involving confiscated American property — and allowed American nationals to sue those same companies in U.S. courts under Title III, creating a liability exposure that made the repair of Cuban infrastructure financially radioactive for any corporation with a balance sheet the U.S. could reach. An entire country’s power grid atrophied under a policy that made its maintenance legally toxic. The Mesa-Lago citation is genuine; the record it draws on is real. The record, taken in its entirety, is a chronicle of what O’Grady’s piece will not say.
The column acknowledges the Venezuela fuel cutoff as devastating. Then it immediately buries that concession under a landslide of historical grid complaints. The rhetorical move — instruct the reader to weigh a century of underinvestment against a blockade-induced fuel famine that plunged the entire island into darkness, and conclude the blockade is a footnote — is the column’s architecture in miniature. The Associated Press reported that during the latest blackout cycle, residents in Santa Cruz del Norte were relying on coal, firewood and makeshift cooking. This is not a grid-decay story; it is a denied-fuel story. The Journal buries the denied fuel because admitting it would indict the policy the page has spent decades defending. The long con: present the effect of the weapon as the pre-existing condition of the target and call the result clarity.
The column then builds its historical case: Castro seized private property, instituted price controls, ended judicial certainty, and imprisoned or exiled the country’s most valuable human capital — a sequence that triggered an immediate contraction of the food supply and, by 1960, a meat shortage, as documented by economists Jorge Salazar-Carrillo and Andro Nodarse-León. That is history, and I will not contest the record. The Castro regime was harmful to Cuba’s economy. The confiscations, central planning, and suppression of human capital are documented and real. But this paragraph’s function in the column’s architecture is not to establish a historical fact. It is to perform the retroactive justification of the embargo — to make sixty-four years of economic warfare read not as an American policy choice but as the logical, almost inevitable consequence of events in 1959. The column’s historical clock always starts in 1959 and always stops before 1962, the year Kennedy broadened the embargo into the full blockade still in force. Cuba was a net food importer; the blockade criminalized the trade it depends on, placing continuous pressure on fertilizer imports and replacement parts for farm equipment. Selective attention: present the past as a completed story whose lessons apply forever, so the present — the fuel cutoff, the remittance blockade, the secondary sanctions — never enters the frame. That is not history; it is a con.
The column then notes that the regime last week admitted its problem is financial by announcing economic reforms designed to attract foreign capital — and immediately waves away the substance by citing the Communist Party’s insistence that the reforms were purely cosmetic. The reform-dismissal move — perfected at the Journal over decades — follows a familiar sequence. The regime announces reforms; the column treats the announcement as an exhausted precedent, then tramples its substance by quoting the Party’s own counter-statement. The questions any serious analyst would ask — what do the reforms say, which could work, do the sanctions permit them to succeed or kill at the root any reform requiring foreign-capital inflows — are never engaged. Instead, we get the blanket framing: the dictatorship will never actually leave power, and any reform is window dressing.
This is the no-true-Scotsman of engagement, and it forms the infinite-sanctions loop: if the regime doesn’t reform, sanctions must stay; if it does reform, the reform is a trick, so sanctions must stay; if it collapses, that proves reforms were never possible, so sanctions were justified all along. It’s a racket that keeps the embargo industry paid — Miami hardliners, think-tank fellows, the broader network of free-market institutions where O’Grady holds a board seat — while Cubans go hungry. The loop guarantees one thing: the suffering continues regardless of what the regime does.
The column then turns to the empty treasury, blaming the ruling elite’s corrupt military conglomerate Gaesa for controlling the hard currency — remittances, payments for goods from state-owned enterprises, and what O’Grady frames as the coercive export of medical personnel.
Frame-engineered relabeling arrives again. Cuba’s medical missions are coercive — passports confiscated, personnel surveilled, salaries overwhelmingly garnished — and deserve serious condemnation. But O’Grady does not describe those mechanisms; she selects a label that carries the freight of kidnapping, sexual exploitation, and forced labor. The label’s function is to block the reader from asking why the treasury is empty in the first place: the U.S. embargo blocks Cuba from international financial markets, remittance channels, and normal trade credit, forcing desperate measures. The shell game: point at the ugly thing the regime does to survive the blockade, hope the reader doesn’t notice the blockade.
The column draws on Alma Guillermoprieto’s writing to paint the spectacle of corruption — a friend marveling at Cuba’s absurdly fertile soil, where fruit trees spring up effortlessly, yet nothing edible can be found in the markets. Foreign guests of the regime enjoyed privileged diets of fruits, vegetables, and cheeses while ordinary Cubans subsisted on starch and gruel.
The spectacle of corruption. The folk anecdote, the nod to Animal Farm, the image of foreign guests eating well while Cubans get gruel — vivid and true, marshaled not to indict the U.S. policy that compounds the privation but to prosecute the regime. The reader is invited to feel disgust, not to ask why, after sixty years of failed regime-change-by-starvation, the privation continues. The operator’s name for this move is the long-suffering-corruption close: let the reader marinate in the regime’s petty cruelty until any question about the embargo feels like an interruption. It runs on indignation instead of evidence.
And the column lands the threat-inflation closer — the Journal’s signature move. The regime hierarchy has gotten rich off this way of life and doesn’t want the party to end. “Gotten rich off this way of life” converts the privileged consumption of a corrupt nomenklatura into a totalizing indictment of the entire society. “Doesn’t want the party to end” is a cadence engineered for retransmission. The effect is permission: if the elite are rich and the people are starving and the elite refuse to change, then the embargo is justified, the fuel cutoff is justified, the hunger is justified. The explicit version — “we should starve eleven million people because their rulers are corrupt” — is monstrous; the implicit version — “they don’t want the party to end” — feels like wisdom. Same policy, laundered through the craft. It’s not clarity. It’s cover.
The column assembles documented regime failures — a failed sugar harvest, a crumbling grid, a corrupt military conglomerate — and presents them as the explanation for Cuba’s present catastrophe. It acknowledges, once, in a subordinate clause, that a U.S.-engineered fuel cutoff was devastating. It omits that the devastation was the knockout, and that the reforms, the empty treasury, and the economic collapse are downstream of a blockade the American reader’s government maintains. The piece photographs the damage caused by the embargo’s chokehold on everything from electric-grid spare parts to insulin to hospital-supplier contracts, then prints the photograph as evidence that the chokehold should tighten.
Here is the template O’Grady’s column runs, and once you learn it you will see it across the Journal’s op-ed page — Venezuela, Iran, any country the U.S. has targeted with economic warfare. Open with a caricature of the regime’s excuse, so every critic becomes a regime puppet. Concede the U.S. role once — a subordinate clause — then bury it under a landslide of historical complaints. Pile on documented regime failure, real statistics and real corruption, all marshaled to create an impression of total endogenous collapse. Deploy a frame-engineered label — “human trafficking,” “slave labor” — to block the structural question of why the regime resorts to desperate measures. Offer no off-ramp: any reform is a trick, so sanctions are perpetual. Close with the threat-inflation permission structure: the elite are getting rich, so the suffering is deserved, so the policy is justified — without ever saying so directly.
It is not analysis. It is a permission structure for a policy that has failed — a permission built by denying the reader sixty-four years of its effect.
— Phukher Tarlson